The former Arkansas and Hamilton High basketball sharpshooter, who helped the Razorbacks to the 1990 Final Four and whose smooth three-point shooting stroke helped him last eight NBA seasons, tuned in last Saturday when first-year SEC member Texas A & M marched into Tuscaloosa to play top-ranked and defending national champion Alabama.

The Aggies, playing their hyper-speed, fast-break offensive attack operated by force-of-nature redshirt freshman quarterback Johnny Manziel, jumped to a 20-0 lead and led wire-to-wire for a 29-24 victory.

"There might be other (non-SEC) teams who run that type of offense, but they don't have that type of quarterback," Day said.

So why is Day, 42, involved in a football discussion? Because after the Aggies' victory last Saturday, I'm convinced A & M's style of play can have as big an impact on SEC football as Arkansas had on SEC basketball when it entered the SEC in the 1991-92 season playing then-coach Nolan Richardson's "Forty Minutes of Hell" running and pressing style.

Texas A & M first-year football coach Kevin Sumlin and Richardson are linked by the fact they steadfastly believed their styles of play, though unconventional, would work in a league built on traditional strategies.

All Sumlin heard last spring, summer and into the preseason was about how SEC defenses are the biggest, fastest weapons of mass destruction in college football. And what he saw on film of SEC defenses confirmed what he heard.

Yet even though Manziel didn't emerge as A & M's starting quarterback until three weeks before the season, Sumlin never wavered in the belief in a system that has produced a No. 8 BCS ranking along with an 8-2 record (5-2 in the SEC's Western Division).

"We have a system we believe in," Sumlin said. "We're very comfortable in it. We understand it, the strengths and the weaknesses of it. If we didn't believe it would work, we wouldn't run it."

In a league that has six defenses ranked nationally in the top 25 in total defense, the Aggies are fifth nationally in total offense and tied for fourth in scoring offense, averaging 545.4 yards and 43.1 points respectively.

Manziel is averaging 379.4 yards total offense. That ranks him second individually in the nation, and he's averaging more individually than 41 teams.

What Manziel has done about every other week, like breaking the longtime SEC single-game total offense record twice in a three-week span, is much like Razorbacks basketball blitzing into the league in the early 1990s.

Just like A & M and Manziel sashaying into the House of Bear Bryant where 14 national championships reside and leaving the proud Crimson Tide dazed and dazzled, Arkansas did the same thing the first time it played as a SEC member at perennial hoops power Kentucky.

The Razorbacks were met by a Rupp Arena-record crowd of 24,324, with many of the fans wearing "Pig Roast at Rupp" T-shirts. But in the game's last 10:55 against the Rick Pitino-coached Wildcats, the Hogs outscored UK 33-15 and sent the home crowd silently toward the door in a 105-88 beatdown.

Arkansas won the SEC regular-season title in its first year in the league and finished 26-8. Two years later, the Hogs won their first national championship.

"We came in the league with a chip on our shoulder," Day said. "Kentucky was one of the teams we targeted. We knew if we beat them, we'd earn a lot of respect. Our mission that game was to make a statement.

"At that time, a lot of the SEC teams were walking the ball up the court. But the way we played back then, the running and the pressing, is the way almost all teams play today."

So it makes you wonder if the rest of the current SEC football teams — except for Ole Miss, which already runs the same frenetic offense as A & M — will incorporate more and more no-huddle, hurry-up to force defenses to adjust.

Because already, Alabama coach Nick Saban is thinking what he has to do to counteract warp-speed play-calling and ball-snapping.

"In the future, we're going to have to practice our No. 1 offense against our No. 1 defense at that tempo, to have our best players who can simulate that speed," Saban said. "Eight times in the game last week, we weren't lined up and they ran a fastball play on us. That's not good coaching, and it's something we'll work on in the offseason."